Internet Searches Resulting in Visits to UAH's
College of Administrative Science Website
See write up in online CAS newsletter

Little did I dream in July of 2004 that this page would become the one of the most viewed page on UAH's business college website. As of April 23, 2006 over 4,450 visits (8.1% of all the pages viewed) this year; last year the count was 6,660 (8.6%). I will try to revise the text soon to make it a little more interesting. 

We use a program called AWStats (Advanced Web Statistics) to analyze traffic on our CAS web server. A few of the items it gives us include:

• The number of visits and number of unique visitors to our web site each month.
• The days of week and hours when those visits take place.
• The filenames of the web pages which are viewed the most.
• The frequency of each Search Engines used to bring visitors to our site.
• What search key phrases and key words direct people to our site.

As of July 28, 2004 Internet search engines resulted in 3,596* visits to our website that month. I would have imagined the Internet's web crawlers out there were directing the populous of the world wide web to us in their quest for information on business, accounting, economics, education, ... But, no look at the list of the "Top 10" phrases to the right which actually did result in visits here. (*On the 29th the number was up another 122 to 3,718.)

I was not too surprised that some directed to us were looking for information on "free web hosting." A number of years ago I created a Free Home Pages list for students in my HTML classes. I was astonished it is frequently the top search phrase bringing folks to CAS! I was further surprised that consistently a number of others are directed here for "tweety bird pictures!" In February 2002 I was the recipient of one of the few chain letters I actually found interesting, rather than forwarding it to all my friends, I posted it to a tweety page.

Dr. Jim Simpson makes course materials available on his web site, so there was no amazement that at least fifteen would be looking for Word, PowerPoint or other file types he has made available. In June, Dr. David Berkowitz's PowerPoint slides were the subject key search phrase ranked second on our site. Dr. David Allen pastime interest in ChampCars continues to make that hobby section of his website consistently a honey pot for folks looking for information on Tom Sneva and Gordon Johncock these past few months, Kevin Cogan and Gordon Smiley joined them in May as four of the top ten search phrases bringing in web visits.

I did scratch my head at what "ankit shah university of pennsylvania" had to do with our business college's website, but then I found it! Scroll a little more than half way down the Capital Management Group page maintained by Dr. Dorla Evans and there it is in the "Where Are They Now Section," Ankit Shah is listed as a recent Finance graduate. Immediately above that section you will find noted, "Jeremy Siegel, University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School." Put the two together and voila you have it, "Ankit Shah" and the "University of Pennsylvania" on the same web page!

But why on earth would looking for a Playboy pictorial bring inquisitors to our website? So I tried feeling lucky with Google and found a news story on money.cnn.com, not a CAS website. I asked Jeeves, same result!

Next I went to Dogpile and there it was, I  entered "women of home depot pictorial" and the number one link was a link to my humor collection which includes:

• Why God* Made Men and Women,
• Home Depot delivers, and
• a PCs  for Dummies (pictorial).

I hope the fourteen weren't disappointed.

* The typo on the DogPile snapshot above that this bit of research uncovered has since been corrected.

Visit Alan Whitten's Humor Page